Category Archives: Hosting - Page 2

Linking spam sent through shared IIS SMTP server to a user

Posted by on January 8, 2013 1 comment

Microsoft’s IIS SMTP service won’t log usernames even when SMTP-AUTH is enabled and clients are all authenticating. So, what happens if someone starts abusing the SMTP service (or you perhaps have a runaway process performing the abuse)?

Well, it takes a little effort but it is possible to track down the username being used to authenticate to the service. Here’s a post by Jeff Graves of OrcsWeb showing exactly how to track down this information: http://jeffgraves.me/2013/01/08/linking-spam-sent-through-shared-iis-smtp-server-to-a-user/

A Tool For Managing MySQL – HeidiSQL

Posted by on December 13, 2012 1 comment

I’ve been having problems with MySQL Workbench lately so went in search of another option. After a little research I found HeidiSQL and I must say that so far it’s excellent. It has a surprising number of features and controls and does exactly what I need for most of my MySQL needs.

Change the WordPress Domain Name After Moving a Site

Posted by on December 10, 2012 2 comments

If you’ve recently changed domain names, or made a copy of the site (for testing, development, or any other purpose) then you need to update the domain setting in WordPress. If you don’t, then all links will point back to the old/original domain name and take you away from the new site. You may also (very likely) run into issues trying to sign in to the admin pages of the new site because of domain name mismatching from what WordPress expects.

The *best* way to change the site’s domain name setting is through the WordPress admin pages. If for some reason you can’t do that, then you can also directly edit the MySQL database. Look at the wp_options table and specifically the record(s) for option_name=’siteurl‘ or option_name=’home‘.

If you can’t access the database you can also manually override the domain setting. To do this locate the wp-config.php file which should be in the root of your WordPress site. Open the file in your favorite text editor and add the two lines below:

define('WP_HOME','http://YourDomain.com/');
define('WP_SITEURL','http://YourDomain.com/');

Obviously you should replace “YourDomain.com” with the actual domain name of the WordPress site.

Happy hosting!

Update Your WordPress Database Connection String

Posted by on December 6, 2012 No comments

I recently decided to create a test/development instance of a WordPress site that I run. In part of doing this I had to deal with how to backup one MySQL database and restore it to another database. After that was done, and I copied over the content files, I had to tell WordPress where to find the new database and how to connect to it.

How is this done? Find the wp-config.php file that’s located in your WordPress site. Open that file in your favorite text editor (like WebMatrix) and look for the database connection settings, which will be near the top of the file (after a large block of comments). It should look like…

// ** MySQL settings - You can get this info from your web host ** //
/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define('DB_NAME', '*NameOfTheDatabase*');

/** MySQL database username */
define('DB_USER', '*NameOfTheDatabaseUser*');

/** MySQL database password */
define('DB_PASSWORD', '*TheDatabaseUserPassword*');

/** MySQL hostname */
define('DB_HOST', '*TheNameOfTheDatabaseServer*');

The sections are self-explanatory so just go through one line at a time and edit the fields to match the database server name, database name, username for the connection, and the password for the database user. Save the file and you should be good to load up your new WordPress site now.

Happy hosting!

Restore MySQL Dump File to a Different Database Name

Posted by on December 3, 2012 2 comments

Restore MySQL Data to a Different DatabaseToday I had to take a MySQL database backup from one database and then restore it to a different database name (for development/testing purposes). I tried a number of different tricks that I found online through Google without any success. The issue was that the user I was using to restore the data was NOT an administrator (root) on the database so it was failing with permission errors – always with an error related to the name of the database I restored FROM.

Okay, time to go old-school. So… I opened the .sql file that was created by the MySQL backup and behold – it’s text! How great is that!? Not some cryptic gibberish like a SQL Server database backup file format.

When looking at the file a little, right there near the top I found the issue. The MySQL backup files by default assume you want to restore to the exact same file name. So then have this line:

CREATE DATABASE /*!32312 IF NOT EXISTS*/ `test` /*!40100 DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci */;

In that line the database that I restored from was actually named “test”. As you can see, it checks for the existence of the database and if it doesn’t exist, it creates the database. Well, in this case I didn’t want that database created and my user didn’t have permissions to perform that action anyway.

So I changed the name of the old database (“test”) to match the name I wanted for the new database (“newTest”).

CREATE DATABASE /*!32312 IF NOT EXISTS*/ `newTest` /*!40100 DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci */;

Great – one error avoided! But thankfully, before existing the .sql file, I noticed the very next line in the file:

USE `test`;

Well, that’s no good. That’s going to use the ORIGINAL database that I performed the restore from. Yikes. If my user had permissions to that database it would have overwritten the original. Not good at all. So, let’s change that…

USE `newTest`;

I did a quick scan through the rest of the file and nothing stood out to me as an issue. I performed the restore (in this case using MySQL Workbench but any tool – even a command line – would have worked fine) and everything went nice and smoothly. Like magic I now have the data from the “test” database restored to my new database named “newTest”.

I hope this is helpful! Cheers, and happy hosting!